How to move your company to open source

About three months ago, I was hired by an 80-person manufacturing company as director of IT, primarily because of my experience with Linux. Job number one, they said, was to ditch as much Microsoft software as possible. They had just acquired a company that used Linux and it was time for the home office to switch over too.

But as soon as I settled in, my boss, the CIO, began to get cold feet. Most of her objections were to changing "where people would have to click."